Interestingly, even as people's appetite for pre-packaged and partially prepared convenience foods from their grocery stores for quick preparation in the home has increased, so has their appetite for more and more fresh produce. Producers of these prepared foods also require more inputs to prepare more product. Coupled with the increased popularity of ethnic foods, some of the fresh products which are in higher demand than ever before are mushrooms, as well as fresh herbs and other vegetables and fruits.
Many different processes are used in mushroom farming, each farmer in addition to the basic process employed having their own secrets which they use to peak the production from their facility. Regardless of methods used, however, mushroom farming as is currently practised is very labour intensive. The product itself requires careful attention, and for all of the technology involved in other farming industries today the harvesting of the mushroom crop is still primarily done manually. For example, where hanging plastic bags or other apparatus are used to grow the mushrooms, the mushrooms are often harvested by slicing them off of the outer surface of the bag or other apparatus by hand with a knife or other cutting tool. Another alternative, where large flat growing beds are employed, is for labourers to move over the bed and manually select and cut the produce which is ready for harvest. Various mechanisms have been conceived to assist in this regard. For example, one U.S. patent discloses a large moving platform which can be moved over the top of the growing bed and the labourers can kneel on top of this platform to thus get down over the growing bed without having to step therein. This allows for the use of bigger growing beds, but the additional apparatus costs more money and also provides a further source of potential contamination in the growing area.
There are mechanized methods of harvesting mushrooms, but they generally involve expensive technology also. For example, one U.S. patent discloses a cutting system mounted to move over a mushroom growing bed which has a video camera attached thereto. As the video camera passes over particular mushrooms growing in the growing bed, a computer interprets the video signal to decide if that mushroom is large enough for harvest. If so, it is cut and vacuumed out. While the problem of excessive manual labour requirements is reduced, technology such as this is prohibitively costly and with so many parts can create additional maintenance problems.
As well as being extremely labour intensive, the other inputs are costly also. For example, in many cases the growing beds or other growing apparatus are constantly reloaded with new substrate, and multiple crops are not always even harvested between such reloading. Also in some cases, the growing apparatus themselves are disposable after use, resulting in additional cost and more labour as they are changed.
The cost of all of the mushroom cultivation and harvesting processes currently employed in the art, along with the other measures which need to be taken in the production thereof, results in a relatively high overall cost and resultant price for mushrooms. The demand for mushrooms would potentially increase even further if the costs of production were altered such that the selling price of the product could be substantially dropped.